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Digital Engineering

Digital Engineering is much more than creating models. It’s about unlocking knowledge and stimulating insight, creating data and a platform for true project collaboration that is set to be the building block for 21st century construction.

As a world class engineering enterprise, Digital Engineering (also known as BIM) allows us to integrate data about a building’s design, construction and future operational function, in order to develop the most efficient methods of delivery and whole-life performance.

To put it simply, if it can be built in the ‘virtual’ world of Digital Engineering, then it can be built in the real world.

Critical to our Design for Manufacture and Assembly agenda, Digital Engineering supports greater collaboration and more informed decision-making by providing a central data source. This helps create more unified delivery teams, while allowing the supply chain to see beyond their own activities to a more holistic view of the client’s objectives.

Fundamental to achieving true Digital Engineering is having the right blend of technical and cultural platforms. An inclusive environment based on openness, cooperation and knowledge-sharing must be underpinned by consistent processes and access points, allowing everyone involved in a project to navigate freely around the model and explore the data.

Crown House Technologies is leading the industry’s Digital Engineering agenda, training design teams to embed it across our culture. At the same time, our delivery teams – both on and off site – are driving Digital Engineering into our business processes. Working with carefully selected consultants, subcontractors and supply chain partners, we are establishing the requisite protocols – achieving consistency at every interface.

The benefits of Digital Engineering

When applied at the very earliest stages of a project, Digital Engineering not only facilitates better design but helps identify and eliminate risks that might arise later down the line – offering greater predictability of building performance, price and programme.

Once a project has been modelled, we can attach a range of data to it – relating to anything from cost to carbon. Critically, Digital Engineering has the capacity to transport us beyond the delivery phase – taking us through a systems lifecycle to create a greater understanding of how early decisions impact on operational performance.

Using Digital Engineering, it is possible to develop a far more accurate image of a building’s carbon footprint. For instance, when integrated with a building’s energy model, we have the capacity to predict ‘real’ use in operation. Not only can this enhance design, this information can be incorporated into facilities management systems to streamline building services and maintenance.

As a leading exponent of this quantum leap in construction methodology, Crown House Technologies will use the momentum around Digital Engineering to effect radical change, through which the industry becomes more integrated at every stage of delivery - from feasibility to construction to operation and, ultimately, decommissioning. It’s ‘challenge and change’ at its most visionary.

Click the image below to see an example of Digital Engineering at the SSE Hydro.